


Acculturation

by Amber



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Awesome Ladies Ficathon, F/M, Gen, Timey-Wimey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-20
Updated: 2010-07-20
Packaged: 2017-10-10 16:51:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 572
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/101945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amber/pseuds/Amber
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's a hundred, hundred ways to deface history.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Acculturation

**Author's Note:**

> Written for alibi_factory's Ladyfest prompt: [Doctor Who, River Song, leaving signs across the universe](http://ineffort.livejournal.com/199061.html?thread=4733333#t4733333).

> VIOLANTE: To hearts like mine suspense is misery.  
> Wax, render up thy trust: be the contents  
> Prosp'rous, or fatal, they are all my due.  
> Hello sweetie. Lunch? 098.7776.394  
> extract from _Cardenio_

  
Archaeology is about studying the driftwood of time's passing. It is the paradox of bringing something into the modern world while keeping it forever in the past. River's colleagues talk about the sanctity of history, that untouchable foreign country, because there's still four hundred years until humanity invents time travel, four hundred-and-thirty years until the first meeting of the organization that will one day be the Time Agency, and four hundred-and-seventy three years (and five months, and sixteen days) until River Song first meets the Doctor. So there are to be no disruptions, no changes, just wait and observe.

  
When she is sixty-three (looking forty-eight and feeling older than the universe) River will be considered one of the universe's greatest authorities on The Doctor throughout Time and Space.

Sometimes she gets letters and transmissions asking for information, or offering it, or demanding it. The Doctor has friends scattered from humanity's start to its very end, and countless more enemies, entire species who wake from dark dreams of his face(s), shivering. And throughout her catalogue of his deeds and experiences winds her own timeline, her own primary source, a thread like a cat's cradle pulling him to where he needs to be.

  
River carves a date painstakingly into the hard wood of the tea chest, the silver beach where they'd watched a binary-star sunset and she'd given him cryptic warnings about Daleks, then sneaks away long before the Bostonians board the ship.

River breaks into a publishing house and works the co-ordinates for a bank planet with a dormant chain of volcanoes into the cover design for Harold Saxon's _Kiss Me, Kill Me_.

River finds a man in a military coat in a nightclub, who is hours away from deciding to return to Cardiff in the twenty-first century, when everything changes, and slips a note in his pocket.

There's a hundred, hundred ways to deface history.

  
"You're cheating," the Doctor tells her very earnestly once, around the middle of their acquaintance. A plasma bullet whizzes by his head, close enough to ruffle his hair. "After this is over, you'll go and send me a message— but you already know I'm going to come."

"Don't be silly, darling." River rolls her eyes fondly as she peeks over the console and fires a volley of return shots. The Doctor cheats just as much as she does, by trying to pretend there are any rules at all. "You always do come."

"That's because you never actually specify whether it's a dreadful emergency or—" he flaps a hand around, looking stroppy, though his temper is probably a lot to do with the guns. "A _date_."

"Where would be the fun in that? Come on, we're almost there." She vaults over their cover with adrenaline pumping through her veins, and he laughs as he follows and this, this must be love.

  
When she is sixteen, she picks the pocket of a distinguished-looking ginger man and comes up with a banana and the complete works of Shakespeare. He grabs her arm and she's ready to fight but instead he just laughs and looks at her like he's known her for her whole life and River _hates_ him already. "Well well well," he says. "Hello, sweetie."


End file.
